Posts filed in Research

One of the most exciting things to happen to knowledge is the increasing amount of free information, available to anyone, for any reason. A recent entry into this new market comes from PhysicsDatabase.com.

There are over 150 titles available for free download, covering a range of science-related topics for students, professionals, and amateurs as well. Here are just three of those selections. Find the entire list here!

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Happy belated birthday, Shakes! Just a day late. Actually, the exact date of his birth has long been disputed. Generally, April 23, 1564, which is also St. George’s Day, is accepted as the date of the Bard’s birth, but because his baptismal records reflect April 26th as the date, no one is completely sure. So hey, maybe I’m not a day late but two days early! (You can read more about the conflicting birth information here.)

As with any celebrity, from Lindsay Lohan to our beloved Bard (let the record show that this is the only time you will ever see these two names so closely linked), all kinds of bizarre theories abound. Here are a few of my favorites. Feel free to perform your own facepalms.

Number I: Shakespeare Was a Jewish Woman

In this theory, John Hudson argues that Shakespeare was, you guessed it, a Jewish woman. The woman Hudson has in mind is Amelia Bassano Lanier, who was the first woman to publish a book of poetry in England. The theory rests largely on the circumstances of Bassano’s life, which Hudson contends match, much better than William Shakespeare’s did, the content of “Shakespeare’s” work. But Hudson has also identified technical similarities between the language used in Bassano’s known poetry and that used in “Shakespeare’s” verse. And he has located clues in the text – recently noted Jewish allegories and the statistically significant appearance of Amelia Bassano Lanier’s various names in the plays – that he says point to her as the only convincing candidate for the author of Shakespeare’s work. (Source)

When I worked in a bookstore in my early twenties (my mother said it was the equivalent of putting an alcoholic behind a bar), this book was one we stocked. I worked in the tiny store inside an elite hotel alone and Nurnberg’s book was one I frequently thumbed through in between waiting on doctor’s wives looking for the latest bodice-ripper (true story).

No matter how well-educated one is, there are always a few words that, for some reason, just don’t stick.

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One of my favorite things that has been going around the internet for some time is the EMO person who posted, “What if he’s your Romeo, but you’re not his Juliet?” The lightning-fast response was, “That means you’re his Rosaline and you survive the friggin’ play.”

Despite the reality of what happens to the “star cross’d lovers,” the persistence in thinking of them as the romantic ideal lives on.

See?

Most people, even those who have never read or seen the play, are more likely to conjure up this image, or something close to it, than gruesome deaths:

I didn’t know, however, until I heard a story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” yesterday, that men (mostly, I guess) have been penning letters to Juliet for centuries. Initially, shortly after the play’s performances, people left notes at what was thought to be her tomb. The numbers of letters left became so great that the post office of Verona established a special office to handle the volume.

The remarkable thing about the letters left for Juliet is that she actually answers. Well, understudies for Juliet do. Dozens of volunteers in Verona, who call themselves “The Juliet Club” answer, by hand, each of the 6,000+ letters addressed to Shakespeare’s heroine each year. All of the letters are retained in a massive archive, to which more letters are regularly added.

The job must be tough but many of the volunteers have been at it for ten and twenty years, some even longer. What do they say to these heartbroken people? Here is one of their answers to someone who was driving herself crazy asking, “What if?”

“What” and “If” are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if? I don’t know how your story ended but if what you felt then was true love, then it’s never too late. If it was true then, why wouldn’t it be true now? You need only the courage to follow your heart. I don’t know what a love like Juliet’s feels like – love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for but I’d like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I will have the courage to seize it. And, Claire, if you didn’t, I hope one day that you will. All my love, Juliet”

If you’ve ever crooned along to Procol Harem’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” you might remember the line about the “sixteen vestal virgins.” Probably, you happily sang along without a clue as to what “vestal” really means. In ancient Rome, “vestals” were priestesses of the goddess Vesta, who was the goddess of the hearth. Her priestesses attended an eternal flame that was never allowed to go out. These attendants took vows of chastity and devoted themselves to religious tasks that were off limits to priests and other men. Vestal virgins could be easily identified by their elaborate hairstyles composed of six intricate braids which were artistically wrapped around the head.

A few years ago, professional stylist and amateur archaeologist Janet Stephens became interested in just how the hairstyles were physically possible. She practiced on dozens of mannequin heads, but despite her laborious attempts, none could hold the shape for very long. She ensconced herself in college research libraries, looking at everything she could find about hairstyles of ancient Roman women. As she soon discovered, until very recently, most scholarship has been conducted by men who had little interest in the fashions of women other than the very elite, and even that was scarce. For seven years, Stephens came up empty handed in her research and frustrated as she continued her attempts at re-creation on mannequins.

Until one day, she happened upon a little fragment of a mention from an scholar who had been writing several hundred years prior. This scholar mentioned a long needle that was made for both embroidery and for sewing of hairstyles. With a little more detective work, Stephens was able to track down the type of embroidery needle. Excited, she tried it on her wigged heads and voila! It worked!

Not completely content with her discovery, Stephens wanted to try it on a “live” head. She placed an ad in the college paper asking for models. One woman answered and through what was surely trying for both of them, the hairstyle was finally achieved:

First, Stephens found, the Vestal’s hair would be separated into sections, each of which would be braided into six separate braids, including a pair of cornrow braids that ran flat across the head above the ears. The hair around the hairline would then be wrapped around a cord, which would then be tied at the nape of the neck. Leftover loose hair from around the face would then be weaved into a final, seventh braid.

Next, the first six braids would be brought around the back of the head and tied in pairs in half square knots. The ends of the braids would then be wrapped up to the front of the head and secured to the cornrow braids above the ears. Then, the seventh braid would have been tucked up and coiled at the back of the head underneath the knotted braids.

The entire process takes about 35-40 minutes, but Stephen feels that two slaves were probably able to do so in about ten minutes. Interestingly, she also discovered that only women with waist-length hair had enough hair to achieve the style.

I don’t know about you, but when I go to bed at night, my brain goes into Super Worry Overdrive. I worry about my bills, my kids, my first drafts (like Anne Lamott, I am afraid someone will find my unedited work and will assume I have committed suicide when I realized my talent was gone).

One of my favorite Tumblr’s, This Isn’t Happiness, recently posted a list of things very intelligent people worry about. Spoiler Alert: Whether they can continue to continue paying for HBO is not on the list. I had to look up some of the things they worry about. Suddenly, whether my cats need therapy or not (they do) is not as pressing. Apparently, I, and you, have more troubling things to keep us on edge:

Homer’s ‘Iliad’ codex from approximately the late 5th-early 6th century A.D. Image: Public Domain

Evolutionary theorist Mark Pagel (University of Reading) and his colleagues, geneticist Eric Altschuler (Univ. of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey) and linguist Andreea Calude (also of Reading as well as the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico) have dated one of literature’s most ancient works, The Iliad, to 762 B.C. “give or take fifty years.”

You might be surprised to learn that scientists have applied the same techniques used to track how genes mutate to dating the codex. “Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes,” Pagel says. “It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer’s vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does.”

“[We] used a linguistic tool called the Swadesh word list, put together in the 1940s and 1950s by American linguist Morris Swadesh. The list contains approximately 200 concepts that have words apparently in every language and every culture, Pagel says. These are usually words for body parts, colors and necessary relationships like “father” and “mother.”

[Then we] looked for Swadesh words in the Iliad and found 173 of them. Then, [we} measured how they changed.

[We] took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric to modern. It is precisely how [we] measure the genetic history of humans, going back and seeing how and when genes alter over time.”

The other thing that researchers have determined is that a single person named “Homer” is unlikely to have existed. Brian Rose, professor of classical studies and curator of the Mediterranean section at the Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum, says “it is clear the Iliad is a compilation of oral tradition going back to the 13th century B.C.” Rose contends that The Iliad is an “amalgam of lots of stories” — about Helen, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Ajax, and others — that “focused on conflicts in one particular area of northwestern Turkey.”

While researchers are unsure about the authorship of The Iliad, they are relatively certain that the city of Troy actually existed and think they know where it was located, thanks to the nineteenth century work of two archaeologists, Heinrich Schliemann and the Frank Calvert, who excavated the Citadel of Troy and found evidence of a battle. Schliemann and Calvert dated the conflict to the twelfth century b.c. but whether the artifacts are from the epic war described in The Iliad or are the remnants of a civil war remains unclear.